Painting Their Futures

By

Ralph Gardner Jr.

Dec. 19, 2012 10:40 p.m. ET

As soon as I saw the finished splatter-art ties that fashion designer Lisa Perry and Ruth Lande Shuman, the founder of Publicolor, a paint-based academic-support program in the city's public schools, made in the basement of Ms. Perry's Madison Avenue boutique last week to raise funds for the nonprofit, I felt even worse about my own anemic effort. Theirs sparkled with life—they cohered counterintuitively, like Jackson Pollack paintings; I'd go so far as to call them commercial, in the best sense of the word.